Watching Westerns or reading novels about the “Old West” emphasized that a cowboy put a lot of stock in a horse, ten gallon hat, and six shooter. Well, to programmers, we put a lot of stock in at least one thing, our text editor or so-called programmer’s editor.

When my job plunged me into Linux programming seven years ago, I was not quite ready to leave a Windows desktop — Ubuntu is my main workstation these days — so Lugaru’s emacs derivative, Epsilon, became my programmer’s editor http://www.lugaru.com/. Epsilon is a great editor as is its emacs parent. However, my use of vi — actually it was vim on newer Linux distributions — kept increasing especially when a quick edit was needed when logged directly onto the system, and editing files only editable by root.

When I investigated vim a little more and found it performed fairly well with remote “ftp” editing, I decided to use it exclusively. One of the tools that helped accomplish the transition was and still is Kim Schulz’s Hacking Vim A cookbook to get the most out of the latest Vim editor, published in 2007 by Packt.

Some books are needed simply to learn a new technology, like Django or Ajax. Those books will be used in one great effort to learn the technology and might serve as an occasional reference. Other books, like Hacking Vim, become well-used work references, almost like an overstuffed pocket guide. Well written, Hacking Vim serves both as an advanced vim tutorial and as a dictionary reference. I am glad I bought it; it is a good friend.

Epilogue:
This book has been updated as of April 2010. Its title is Hacking Vim 7.2.